5 Stages of Cloud Security Automation framework

Cloud security automation is the only way to align with furious DevOps demands and scalability. The anchor here is to automate security functions in such a way that it still gives a degree of control. In simple words, IT teams cleverly need to set guardrails for automation processes.

Public cloud is a whole new playground. If you are thinking that traditional methods of security are going to keep your data and application secured, then you need to wake up now. Better sooner than later because the legacy methods are not developed for the cloud.

FireMon State of the firewall 2018 surveyed 300 security professionals. Nearly 40% of the survey participants said that IT teams or the application owners are responsible for network security in the cloud and 20% did not know who was responsible.

The survey results conclude that infrastructure owner is responsible for security which aligns with AWS’ “Cloud Security is a shared responsibility” campaign.

The process of automating cloud security tasks has raised eyebrows for IT teams. The security rules that are conventionally created and deployed manually can now be automated which brings new evolution to the cloud. Majority of IT teams support change management as the key aspect of security automation. But the challenges arise during implementation processes.

In order to improve cloud security posture with automation, follow the checklist to ease all the planning and strategy phase:

1. Monitoring

Cloud has been and will always be subjected to rapid changes to meet all the operational demands. That is why we all prefer a cloud, right? So, it is necessary that you monitor the workflow of all the tasks in your infrastructure.

2. Evaluation

Knowing what to automate is the first critical step. The closely monitored workflows might give you insights into which tasks can be automated like repetitive tasks, resource provisioning, deployments, creating security rules, etc. And the list goes on, depending on your monitoring and evaluation abilities.

3. In-depth analysis

Now, you need to analyze the collected information in depth by differentiating it on the basis of severity as high, medium or low risk. This allows you to do controlled automation and see the impact on infrastructure by automating low-risk process first and then, dealing with medium followed by high.

4. ‘Cloud Security Automation’ done right with reporting

The resulting analysis can now be sent to integrated systems to automate the workflows. The automation processes should be configured to generate the reports to present the overview of the changes before or after.

5. Remediations

By this step, your workflows started painting a big picture of cloud automation as a whole, doesn’t matter you started automating simple or complex workflows. This gives you a window to implement remediation and improve overall security posture.

In Conclusion With

Cloud is not going away anywhere. According to Gartner, the public cloud revenue worldwide will grow to estimated $331 billion by 2022.

As the cloud is becoming a vital part of IT infrastructure, you need to focus on adopting it efficiently.

Setting up cloud automation is the perfect start for enterprises to move ahead in the cloud journey. When you are able to standardize cloud monitoring, utilization and optimization for your infrastructure then you should get serious and take steps toward automation. So, you need to have a team of experts that curate enterprise-level strategies to get the job done.

You also need to keep in mind that it’s an ever-evolving and refining process.

Cloud Evangelists are CMI's in house ambassadors for the entire Cloud ecosystem. They are responsible for propagating the doctrine of cloud computing and help community members make informed decisions.